[smartBridges] Quality of sB Forum

[Nish Park]

This is a great user forum with a large number of subscribers. It allows us to stay in close contact with our customers. The benefits to our company are enormous. I am sure it is beneficial to you guys also to have the necessary checks and balance to make sure we are staying close to your requirements. We are glad to have made this our official User Group and assign the company resources to support it.   We would like to get your inputs on improving the quality of this forum. What can we do to make this an interesting “watering hole” for people to trade their experiences? How can we encourage more people to contribute?   Many people have expressed frustrations at the increasing traffic and difficulties of weeding through a lot of chatter. So we need to work on increasing the quality and decrease the quantity. Here are a few suggestions/comments we would like to make.   1)       In the past weeks the fine line between a User Group forum and the Support Desk has vanished.  Many of the emails posted to the forum should be addressed to the Support Desk to receive the individual consultation. These emails do not really provide any general benefits and cause the chatter that many have to weed through. The thermal issue was a big contributor for these types of postings. But now with most of the open issues behind us, the traffic should decrease.   2)       We would like to suggest that you fill out the Tech Support request form at http://www.smartbridges.com/new/support/support_req.php. We are better able to track and close the issues for the Ticket Numbers assigned by this form. It also tells us that you want a specific response from us. Many times with forum messages/discussions we may not realize that you want us to comment on some specific topic, leading to unnecessary frustrations.     3)       Our support staff will try to do some filtering. If we feel that the subject is not of general interest, instead of posting the follow up to the forum, we will reply back to the individual’s email address. If you feel otherwise, feel free to switch back the reply to the forum.   4)       We do spend a lot of resources on keeping our FAQs updated. So please try to find the answer before posting to the forum (RTFM J)   5)       Since past few weeks we have expanded the Support desk coverage to 24x7, including the phone support. We will be adding a few other enhancements. So again getting the Tech Support should become easier. So let’s reserve this User Forum for some more interesting discussions.   6)       What can we do to encourage participation from more people? Today our estimate is that the forum receives contributions from perhaps less than 2% to 3% of our customer base. This is not a well balanced participation.   7)       Now part-15.org has a searchable achieve for this forum. Hopefully this addresses one of the frequently expressed wish list. Please let us know if you think that we should still work on having the achieves available from our web site.   8)       We will encourage more sB employees and business partners to participate in the forum to bring higher quality of information.   Again, please give us your suggestions on how we can make this forum even better. Thanks.     Nish Park smartBridges